Tiger Woods in Chicago

A course record of 62 in the third round of the BMW Championship and a move from 1 down after 9 holes to being 7 up after 18 in a tournament that included the best golfers on the planet.

It was an extraordinary exhibition – freakish carries the wrong connotation – by one of the greatest athletes of modern times. I couch-potatoed my way through Sunday watching a recording of the event on Foxtell. 8 birdies and an eagle – his approach shots were laser-like in their precision. The NYT summarised one shot that I watched with disbelief. It seemed superhuman:

The route Woods took to the top of the leader board was paved with the kind of iron shots that defy description and, at times, credulity. His 6-iron second shot from behind a tree in the left rough on the seventh hole was one such shot. Woods’s path to the pin 186 yards away was blocked by a tree that was 10 feet from his ball. To reach the green, he had to hit a fade that would move about 40 yards from left to right. To get to the hole position, which was cut on a ledge in the back right portion, he needed to land the ball softly so it would stop short of the back bunker.

No sweat.

“I had to start that ball left of the green and cut it out of that rough,” Woods said. “I had to take something off of it, which I didn’t want to have to do, because when you’re trying to cut it, you need some speed. I didn’t want to try to take something off of it, but I had to. It came off perfect, couldn’t come off any better than that.” His ball came to a quick stop on the green, some 18 feet from the hole. He missed the birdie putt, but the iron shot gave him the impetus he needed to continue what became a full-on assault on the course, a round that “just kind of built upon itself,” he said.

1 comment to Tiger Woods in Chicago

Yes, great golf, but he did not cheat by signing for fewer shots than he had hit, unlike ALL IPCC “climate change scientists”, and you and Peter Wood, with your continuing refusal to explain why zero correlation between changes in [CO2] and temperature, both as measured at Mauna Loa, does not decisively refute the “radiative forcing” theory of climate change.